


Healing Hands

by yfere



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, I've been tricked into falling in love with this emo gal, spoilers c2e55
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-16
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-19 05:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18131417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yfere/pseuds/yfere
Summary: They all have their own ways of healing each other, picking up each other after a fight. Yasha wishes she were better.





	Healing Hands

Yasha’s hands were trembling, and she hated herself for it. Hated it. She never shook when she swung the Magician’s Judge, never flinched away from blood when it ran into her eyes, down her arms or her sides. When the cold wave of fury took her, she was precise, silent, unshakable. Everything in her still and untroubled. But not when she did this, this thing that came from a different part of her entirely, that screamed _cowardcowardcoward_ for every measly, weak pulse of healing that trickled from her fingertips. She always lost too much of it. Always jerked her hands away from the warm slick of their blood too soon.

It made it worse that Beau was always grateful. That they all were. But Yasha knew better, knew where she was failing. She could only just manage to stay silent on the matter, and press the shame flat against the unforgiving surfaces of her memory. Turn it into something less three dimensional, less real, something to turn away from and put away until the next time she was afraid.

She couldn’t help but watch the others, and compare. Nott, dashing with her potions, cracking teeth against the bottles. Her narrow-eyed concentration on a brew, how she’d swoop down on flowers that Yasha was looking at because she _needed_ that, it could be _medicine_ for someone. Caduceus, the best of them, with a faint smile and a slightly waving hand, knitting something together that ran a little deeper than the gashed flesh and fractured bones. Beau, who had _nothing_ , and yet kept pulling and beating them away from death, who always worked so hard and would know how to use this power of Yasha’s far better than she. And Jester. Who didn’t need to sink away to another place to be able to fight, who could kill _and_ wear her heart on her sleeve and somehow not break for it. And that, Yasha thought, was surely why her healing was so unhesitating, so perfect. An eager, bubbling torrent, carbonation in the back of the throat, like the sparkling wine at the Chateau that made Yasha wonder for the first time if she could drink for something other than getting drunk.

 

 

 

As always Yasha pulled away from Fjord too quickly, feeling scalded by the proximity. Not able to bear the thought of him coming to consciousness and how his first thought seeing her face must be that she was a threat. How could she touch anyone, after what she—

She turned away only to be nearly blown back by another explosion, and for a moment she worried that Caleb was lost, that he had another fireball after all—but when the debris cleared she only saw Nott, crossbow raised and with a slowly dawning horror crawling up her face.

Jester was screaming, and already running forward. Past the body of the incubus—and Yasha nearly plunged beneath the ice again at the sight—and to the charred body of Caduceus. _Caduceus._ How long had he been down?

Tears were spilling freely from Jester’s eyes, but she didn’t fumble, didn’t shake as she pulled out the diamond. As she weaved her hands in a steady sigil and the diamond fractured into sparkling, flowing fragments, Yasha had to turn away. A true miracle. How could she survive, looking at a thing like that head on? And of course it would be Jester to do it.

“It was my last spell,” Jester slurred to her, when Caleb finished the Tiny Hut a while after. “I got to keep everyone. I’m so _tired._ ”

“Then sleep,” Yasha said, trying to sound gentle. She wanted to crush Jester to her chest— _thank you for saving everyone_ —but she couldn’t, she couldn’t bear to touch her right then.

 

 

 

  
Fjord said they couldn’t take the chance that more tears to the Abyss wouldn’t appear around the Anchor as they slept. Caleb volunteered the first watch, and at the beat of silence that followed, began to shrink into himself. “Oh—you think—”

Beau started to make a protesting sound. “I trust you,” Yasha said, firmly. He needed to hear it, and they did too. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for a while though. Can I stay up with you.”

He nodded, silent. So they sat together by the edge of the Hut, Nott scampering off with a pained look after failing to get Caleb to respond to her with more than tired hand motions. She’d pressed leather straps into Yasha’s flinching hands as she left, extracting a promise that she would try to translate. But Yasha couldn’t get her head on straight enough to try to read anything right then. She doubted Caleb would be able to focus on the job of watching either—and that was part of why it felt so appropriate, so right to be with him right then. He had hurt her, and she had hurt him, and she felt like they could understand each other better right now than any of the others.

Unless she didn’t understand him. When she worked up the courage to glance at him out of the corner of her eye, she found him clutching his stone in a white-knuckled grip, feverishly writing in a book with his other hand. The blood and soot stood out even more gruesomely on his skin in the light of the driftglobe, and Yasha realized with a sinking feeling just how used she was to the sight of Caleb near death.

“What are you doing?” she asked, and he started so violently his pen tore a hole in the page. “ _Scheisse._ ”

“I’m sorry. I meant—” What she really wanted to do was apologize, but she realized she didn’t quite have the words for it, that could stretch around the enormity of her guilt. Caleb blinked at her with a kind of hazy confusion, before opening his palm and thrusting his stone almost directly beneath her nose. It took some effort of will not to hit him in reaction to the sudden movement.

“I have an idea,” he said, with an intensity that surprised her.

“You…do?”

“When I saw Jester with the diamond. I am tired of—today was—she spent so much of her energy on me, on trying to keep me alive, after. Well, after.”

 _After you tried to kill her? Or I tried to kill you?_ A dangerous question to ask. Yasha stayed silent.

“I am always getting hurt, and I do not want to be a burden to you all. I want to return the favor, and—I think I can, in a way. Because. What makes a diamond so different from any other kind of rock?”

Yasha thought about it. “I don’t know—they’re prettier? I don’t really understand it. They seem sort of the same.”

Caleb nodded. “It’s value, and value is not such a—a thing everyone thinks of in the same way. Like Nott—she loves things like door handles, and doilies, that are not so important for people like Beauregard or you or me. If you can make the world think anything is so valuable as a diamond, then anything can be a diamond, I think.”

Yasha wasn’t entirely sure what Caleb was saying, but she pictured him doing what Jester had done with Caduceus, and thought she understood a little. “You want to be like Jester,” she said, realizing.

“If only I could,” Caleb said, and Yasha recognized that look of resignation, the desperate love and admiration beneath, because that was how Jester was etched into her heart as well. They were a little alike then, her and Caleb. She imagined Jester between the demon and Caleb, reaching down to wrap a confident hand into his to heal him. She tried to imagine herself in the same position, and—couldn’t. Much easier to imagine making the blood go out rather than in, and it was only a matter of time before she forgot how to staunch the bleeding and only hurt someone worse when she touched them, wasn’t it?

She couldn’t— “What time is it?” she asked softly. His smile was tense and raw.

“Oh, time for our watch to be over, I think,” he said. “Would you wake Fjord up tonight?”

She didn’t argue, didn’t point out that it was usually Caleb who woke Fjord for watches. That kind of honesty was more Beau’s style than Yasha’s. It was all right for Caleb to avoid them all for a while, she thought, because she was inclined to do the same.

So for the second time that day, she reached over to touch Fjord’s shoulder, and for the second time that day jerked back as his eyes opened to look at her. “Time for watch,” she muttered, turning to find where her bedroll had been placed against Beau’s.

Fjord’s voice was scratchy from sleep. “Caleb asleep?” he asked. And he was—the moment he’d closed his book he’d crumpled like he was in the aftermath of a Haste. His face was right then smushed between his elbow and his little rock. He’d no doubt wake up with a bruise.

“I wanted to talk—I want to talk to you,” Fjord said. “Just for a little bit. I know you want to sleep.”

“It’s fine.” She turned back, made an effort to meet his eyes.

“I just—thank you. You saved my life today,” he said. And of all the things she expected him to say, it wasn’t that. “I’ve been wondering—when you heal someone, is it because of, your god? The Stormlord?”

She folded her arms, hugging her chest. “No. It’s something I’ve always been able to do.” Like patching up Zuala after a hunt—

Fjord’s face fell. “Oh. I thought…” Yasha said nothing into the silence, and Fjord seemed to take some heart from that to continue. “I’ve been thinking lately that of everything I can do, I still can’t do much more than try to pull someone out of the way, or stand in front of them when they’re in trouble. I felt—ha, I felt pretty useless today, to be honest.”

“You’re not useless. You found the anchor, and all those glyphs. You found the tunnel, and the bugbear.”

He waved his hand. “Caduceus could have done the same. Did. Or Caleb would have, if we asked him. Or Beau. And you know, those demons had me for a moment too—if Caleb’s fire hadn’t burned me again I would have been in the same boat as you. The point is…I’m glad you took the time. To rescue me. I wish I could do what you do. I wouldn’t half mind if I could be more like you.”

And there it was again, that look of admiration. This time directed at _her._

She dug her fingers further into her biceps. “Thank you,” she said. She didn’t say _be careful what you wish for._ She didn’t say _you don’t know how terrible I am_. She didn’t say _we’d be better off if you could do this instead of me._ No, it wouldn’t do any good. So she took the memory of his expression and tucked it away in a place she wouldn’t keep seeing it. It was time to sleep now, and she didn’t want that face with the others to invade her dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> I mean fuck canon, Nott the professional alchemist can absolutely make healing potions, what are you talking about?
> 
> Yasha is wonderful, and I will personally burn down the house of anyone who says otherwise.


End file.
